The Magic Hand

Inspiration

Nowadays, people cannot live without mobile phones and we cannot interact with people without touching a capacitive screen. However, imagine you are a disable person with no hand or paralysis and have to use the huge, ugly and special mobile devices which makes you feel special already, how would you feel? Therefore, our design is trying to help those disable people to use modern capacitive screen mobile phone with a simple and convenient phone cover film which can touch any points of the screen instead of human fingers.

What it does

The Magic Hand is a film which can be attached to any capacitive screen to help disable people to use the phone. It works as a output and takes instructions from any sort of input sensors, eg, LDR, Muscle sensors, BCI and Voice Control.

How we built it

We built a prototype of our design to interact a game called piano tiles which has high requirement on dexterity and reaction time. We used Light-Dependent Resistors (LDR) to detect the brightness of the tiles at certain points. Arduino board was used to process and control the signals at outputs. Furthermore, the to simulate human fingerprints, we used relay, resistors, aluminium foil and 3D-printing to trigger the capacitive screen.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant challenge we faced was the calibration of the actuator. Since we used an iPhone for demo, the specific requirement of Apple screen are unknown to us, for example, the surface area of actuator.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our prototype can achieve a score that higher than human reactions which means that its able to achieve a dexterity and reaction time that users required, especially for disable people. That also means our idea about the capacitive screen film is achievable.

What we learned

How to build a high dexterity demand devices and trouble shooting under high pressure and time limit.

What's next for The Magic Hand

Build the full version of The Magic Hand, capacitive dexterity engine, by increasing the control area of our current version of The Magic Hand. To achieve this, we need to built a PCB board which contains the main control circuit and try different types of material to improve the performance of device.